odinsblog:

CAPITALISM 101: When prisons don’t want to train or rehabilitate prisoners, but they want them to work demanding, very dangerous jobs for as little as $1 per day.

This happens all the time, across vocations. Flooding the job market with low wage prison labor artificially depresses the wages of people looking for jobs in many fields, not just firefighters. This is the opposite of “free market” competition. If you have a skill or product to market, how can you compete with cheap, prison slave labor?